For about 10 months I’ve had the world map displayed on the top left sidebar of this web site. It’s a really cool free widget created by amung.us. Whenever a visitor visits the web site, it posts a marker on the world map identifying the location of each visitor.  Recently, the markers on the map have been resetting everyday.   Since I like the cumulative record of visitors on the map, I contacted the company and asked why they made the change, and here is their response:

We experienced some technical difficulties at one of our data centers which resulted in some users missing stats data. We are attempting to recover any lost data, and restore the service to full working capacity.

Thank you for bearing with us during this time.

Christopher C. Shannon

whos.amung.us

Christopher responded quite rapidly, and I appreciated his frank response.  However, I grew impatient waiting for a fix, and I’ve been thinking about upgrading to feedjit.com for a while now. I hesitated because I didn’t want to lose all the data that has accumulated since I’ve been using maps.amung.us.  While I was drawn to feedjit.com’s widget because I like the map better, it wasn’t enough to make me switch even though maps.amung.us hadn’t made a single improvement since I began using the widget ten months ago.  However with this defect, there was nothing to lose by giving feedjit.com’s widget a try, and so I did. 

The web changes everything.  Now that so much software is offered for free, the barrier for switching vendors based on price is gone.  Consequently, high quality is even more important when the barrier to switching vendors is nearly zero.  Quality and useful features on the first delivery are a competitive advantage, and they are often more important to consumers than new/enhanced features delivered frequently.  Incremental, frequent enhancements to satisfied customers is simply not required, but if you get your quality wrong or deliver the wrong features, you will lose customers — even formerly satisfied customers.